Stellar Work

Every industry has invented a substitute for the actualwork, and the best practitioners have quietly stopped using it.

Sixty episodes in, Ben spends a solo episode tracing onepattern that showed up across 40-plus practitioners in five countries. The"sticker in the drawer" wears different clothes everywhere. Sometimesit's a sprint ceremony, sometimes an AI pilot with no measurable outcome,sometimes a dashboard that counts inputs and calls it progress.

What you'll hear:

Why Sander Hoogendoorn at iBOOD killed sprints, retros andthe Scrum Master role, and ships changes before lunch instead.

Why the agile mindset is always someone else's problem, andwhat the research from Karen Eilers and Christiaan Verwijs says actually movesthe needle (it's leadership behaviour, not more artifacts).

The AI section: why every human in the loop is a bottleneck,why time-on-task goes up 20 to 40 percent with AI tools, and the MIT findingthat 95 percent of GenAI pilots show zero measurable impact.

The disappearing junior pipeline, and why Sander and Shopifyhire more juniors, not fewer.

The MIT EEG study on what happens to your brain when youprompt first and think second.

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Host: Ben

AI tools increase time-on-task by 20 to 40%. That's not a bug report, that's a UX research finding.Sophie is a UX Researcher at Citigroup with a background in Chemical Engineering. She has built and scaled research practices in both start-ups and large organisations, embedding human-centred ways of working that drive real business impact. At the crossroads of design, technology and strategy, she transforms research into a strategic partner. She combines scientific thinking with creativity to tackle complex challenges and uncover new opportunities. She also mentors emerging tech talent, championing inclusivity and inspiring the next generation.What you'll hear:- Why cognitive load goes up, not down, when you add AI to a product- The 3-to-7 item working memory limit and what it means for AI interfaces- Change fatigue: what happens when your product updates faster than users can adapt- Trust as a UX metric and why it's nearly impossible to measure- Microsoft's Copilot sprawl as a case study in feature overload- Why not everything needs AI, and how to push back when stakeholders disagree- Three tips for UX researchers who want to stay relevant without burning outLinks:Sophie Aldebert's LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sophie-aldebertGoogle NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/More episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

Most engineering teams using AI are about 2x faster. Not 10x. The bottleneck moved, but nobody optimized the rest.Jeff Lee-Chan spent 10 years at Google working on YouTube, then seven years at Snapchat. He went from IC to staff engineer to engineering manager. Now he spends 20 to 30 extra hours a week experimenting with AI tools outside his day job.In this conversation, you'll hear:Why a 30-minute AI side project convinced him the world had changedWhat the actual AI stack looks like inside Big Tech right now (it's mostly Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex)Where the real bottleneck sits when coding speed isn't the problem anymoreWhy he thinks 4-5 custom code review bots beat a single default oneHow AI is shrinking the junior engineering pipeline and what that meansThe one mistake he made early in management that he'd warn every new manager aboutJeff Lee-Chan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-lee-chan/Mentoring with Jeff: https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/jeffreylee-chan/More episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

Summary

In this episode, Ben sits down with Derek Borthwick — sales expert, bestselling author, and founder of Power2Mind — to talk about what actually makes people buy. Spoiler: it's not your pitch deck.

Derek dismantles the classic "sales playbook" approach and explains why scripts, product dumps, and logical arguments consistently fail to persuade. Drawing from neuroscience, NLP, and decades of hands-on experience in asset management and corporate sales, he lays out how human decision-making really works — through the reptile brain, the emotional center, and only then through logic. The problem? Most salespeople (and most managers trying to push for change internally) do it in reverse.

Ben and Derek cover practical techniques anyone can start using immediately: the echo technique for deeper listening, the "my friend John" storytelling method for subtle persuasion, how to control your own emotional state before a meeting, and why addressing "What's in it for me?" (WIIFM) is non-negotiable. They also discuss why PowerPoint is killing your presentations, how rapport stacks like sheets of paper, and why your boss is more likely to say yes right after lunch.

Ben shares his own experiences from robotics sales and his time at Ford, where live product demos and test drives consistently outperformed spec sheets — proving Derek's point that emotion drives decisions and logic just fills in the gaps.

Derek Borthwick is the founder of Power2Mind and a leading expert on the psychology of communication, sales, and persuasion. He is a multiple bestselling author with books covering sales psychology, body language, negotiation, public speaking, and verbal communication. His work draws from neuroscience, NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), and clinical hypnotherapy to create what he calls the Power2Mind method — a practical framework for understanding how people actually make decisions.

Derek has over 25 years of experience in sales and marketing, including extensive work in asset management where he helped generate well over $1 billion in sales. He has trained and coached teams at FTSE 100 companies and lectured at leading Scottish universities. He holds diplomas in Clinical Hypnotherapy, NLP (Master Practitioner level), and Transformational Coaching from the Henka Institute. He also served as Area Director for Toastmasters International. Derek is based in Scotland.

Derek Borthwick / Power2Mind

• Website: www.power2mind.com

• LinkedIn: Derek Borthwick (search on LinkedIn)

• Books on Amazon: "Inside the Mind of Sales", "Body Language", "How to Talk to Anybody", "The Art of Negotiation", "Public Speaking: How to Speak Effectively Without Fear"

Mentioned in the Episode

• Derren Brown — "Person Swap" experiment (search "Derren Brown Person Swap" on YouTube)

• HeartMath Institute — research on heart electromagnetic fields and synchronization: www.heartmath.org

• Israeli parole study — research showing judges grant more parole after eating (Danziger, Levav & Avnaim-Pesso, 2011)

• Change Blindness — the psychological phenomenon behind the "person swap" and why we see what we expect to see

• The dress illusion — the viral blue/gold dress debate as an example of how perception differs between people

• "Product vomit" — term coined by John McPherson (Scottish sales trainer) for overwhelming prospects with product information

Links & References

Summary

Agility was supposed to change everything. And it did — just not always in the way we hoped. In this episode, Ben sits down with Allen Holub to talk about how agile methodology shaped the software industry, where it went off the rails, and why AI might be repeating the same mistakes. From the original promise of the Agile Manifesto to the certification industrial complex, and from developer empowerment to the next wave of AI-driven disruption, this is a candid, no-holds-barred conversation about what went wrong and what it takes to actually get it right.

Allen Holub is a software development thought leader, consultant, trainer, and author who helps organizations become more effective at creating software. With a career that started building robots and writing compilers, Allen has since served as CTO for early-stage startups, Principal Architect for a medium-sized one, and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Mills College  where he taught what he calls "real agile," not the Agile-industrial-complex version. He's worked with hundreds of companies from startups to large enterprises, engaging at every level from CEO coaching to mobbing with individual teams. Allen is widely published, with bestselling books like Taming Java Threads and Compiler Design in C (used as a textbook at Berkeley, CalTech, MIT, and IIT), and was a contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's Journal and JavaWorld. He co-moderates the 200K+ member Agile and Lean Software Development group on LinkedIn and is a sought-after international speaker  many of his talks are available on YouTube. A dual US-EU citizen, Allen continues to consult and train on both agile process and software architecture, with a focus on building flexible systems that can evolve gracefully over time, with and without AI.

Allen on Linkedn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenholub/

Allens Mail: [email protected]

Allens Website: https://holub.com/

Allen on Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@allenholub

Stellar Work:

Here is the Stellar Work Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork

Check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.stellarwork.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information about how evolutionary agile transformations work

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Summary

In this episode, Ben talks with Matas Rastenis, Senior Staff Engineer at Uber's Developer Platforms team, about what it actually looks like to bring AI tools to one of the world's largest engineering organizations  not as a flashy demo, but as production-grade infrastructure that delivers measurable impact. Matas shares how Uber approaches AI augmentation for its engineers: evaluating which tools to adopt, building the enablement infrastructure to support them, and making sure they're reliable and cost-effective at scale.

A key focus of the conversation is measurement. How do you actually prove that AI tools are making engineers more productive? Matas breaks down how Uber thinks about quantifying the value of AI-assisted development, moving beyond vanity metrics to real impact on developer velocity and output quality. They also dive deep into the organizational side — the change management challenge of rolling out new AI-powered workflows across thousands of engineers with different habits, skill levels, and levels of skepticism. Matas shares practical lessons on what works when driving adoption: meeting engineers where they are, building trust through reliability, and ensuring tools deliver value beyond slick demos. A must-listen for anyone leading developer experience, platform engineering, or AI adoption initiatives in large organizations.

Matas Rastenis is Staff Software Engineer on Uber’s Developer Platform team, building AI devtools that run reliably at scale. He leads AI testing automation and AI quality infrastructure, turning agentic workflows into production-grade systems that are measurable, cost-aware, and dependable. With a foundation in SRE and distributed systems, he focuses on making AI tooling observable, governable, and easy for engineers to trust.

Uber at https://www.uber.com/

Engineering at Uber: https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/

Matas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matasr/

Stellar Work:

Here is the Stellar Work Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork

Check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.stellarwork.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information about how evolutionary agile transformations work

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In this episode, Ben sits down with Matthias Wagner, founder and CEO of Flux AI, to explore how artificial intelligence is finally making its way into hardware engineering — a field where design tools have barely changed in decades. While software development has seen wave after wave of innovation, hardware engineers have been stuck with legacy tooling that hasn't kept up. Matthias explains how this gap inspired him to build Flux, a cloud-based platform that acts as an AI-powered hardware engineering assistant, helping engineers go from a product brief to a manufacturable PCB design in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Flux is the world’s first AI hardware engineer. Just as Devin and Claude Code have transformed software development, Flux is transforming hardware design with agentic AI by allowing anyone to design PCBs with natural language prompts. Flux is able to understand schematics, PCB layouts, and component constraints, helping teams design, review, and optimize hardware in real time. It makes professionals 10x faster and gives non-engineers the ability to build products they could only dream of in the past. With more than 1 million sign-ups and more than 6 million projects created to date, Flux is pioneering a new era of AI-native hardware design.

Matthias Wagner is the founder and CEO of Flux AI, a San Francisco-based hardware design platform that's bringing AI-powered tools to the world of PCB and circuit design. Before founding Flux in 2019, Matthias held product and technology roles for nearly two decades, including product management positions at Meta and as an instructor at General Assembly. His career path is anything but conventional — before returning to the electronics world, he built a company in the music industry whose work sold over a billion units globally, including the viral hit "Axel F" by Crazy Frog, which has amassed nearly 4 billion views on YouTube. Today, Flux serves over 300,000 hardware engineers, including teams at Fortune 500 companies, with the mission of making hardware design as accessible and AI-augmented as modern software development.

Relevant links:

https://www.flux.ai/

https://x.com/BuildWithFlux

https://x.com/MatthiasWagner

Flux

Matthias Wagner

🤑Discount Code- 20% off: stellarworkflux🤑

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Stellar Work:

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Check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.stellarwork.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information about how evolutionary agile transformations work

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Summary

In this episode, I sit down with Harry Max, author of Managing Priorities, to explore why prioritization is one of the most critical — yet frustratingly difficult — skills in work and life. We unpack what makes managing priorities so challenging, and how the game changes as you move from the personal level to teams and entire organizations. Harry shares practical tips and frameworks for getting it right, whether you're sorting through your own to-do list or aligning an enterprise around what truly matters.

Harry Max is the author of Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decision, and a seasoned Silicon Valley executive player-coach; a fractional Chief Product Officer who coaches exec teams as a hands-on leader. Harry's specialty is partnering with leaders to manage through transformations and change in chaotic environments.

His experience includes having been a founder/CEO, operational leader, and consultant with start-ups, innovators, and global brands, including Apple, Adobe, DreamWorks, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, PayPal, Planet Labs, Rackspace, Silicon Graphics, Skype, and Symantec.

He lives in Santa Cruz, California, USA with his family and rescue cat.

Harrys LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrymax/

Harrys Book: https://www.amazon.de/Managing-Priorities-Create-Smarter-Decisions/dp/B0D932D1R6/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=1LYVHKOTHHVH5&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-_Ol0Sgl5lvLR6u5aCdusAUSpSAlS5Rc5Z9WqRhjlu41H33nngz7tK1fXmi8SV7A7HWNpiFd0Zj6fjU6mPVQ9EpEU7F0MLIK5MSS6S30UM0qdVaS_FOnVxWZU0SFOg5wHCjTchpyr7U3eHhurmxXqmx-Q6qY_-z8cb9sERTbcg2GZtwzyVLqAMvPHneyQlhq.0qFhUjc1UxKS4JO6GXq0RUd7a5JAl6oggGIKxF73oos&dib_tag=se&keywords=harry+max+prioritizing&qid=1771549038&sprefix=harry+max+prioritizing%2Caps%2C119&sr=8-1

Stellar Work:

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Check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.stellarwork.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information about how evolutionary agile transformations work

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Summary

In this conversation, Nadja and I explored several key themes:

The Schaeffler Production System – How one of Germany's largest automotive suppliers

approaches operational excellence and standardized work across a global manufacturing

footprint.

Lean Fundamentals – What lean really means in practice, beyond the buzzwords—and why

the philosophy matters more than the tools.

From Military Officer to Lean Leader – How Nadja's experience in the German Armed

Forces shaped her leadership style, her comfort with structure and standards, and her ability

to train and motivate large teams.

Engaging the Shop Floor – Practical approaches to getting factory floor workers genuinely

involved in evolutionary change and continuous improvement, rather than having

improvement "done to them."

Leading Without Taking Away Responsibility – Perhaps the most nuanced topic we

covered: how leaders can guide, support, and develop their teams without inadvertently

disempowering them or creating dependency. It's about building capability, not just

compliance.

Nadja Böhlmann:

Nadja Böhlmann is Director of the Schaeffler Production System at Schaeffler, the global

automotive and industrial supplier. Her career path is anything but conventional—she started

as an officer in the German Armed Forces before transitioning into the world of lean and

continuous improvement.

Her military background gave her deep expertise in training, leadership, and building

structured systems that work. After leaving the Bundeswehr, she gained experience across

diverse industries including construction, healthcare, food production, and automotive

(notably at Porsche Leipzig). She also served as Global Head of Kaizen at Teknos, an

international coating manufacturer, where she built a Kaizen culture from scratch including

training programs and eLearning systems.

Nadja holds a Master of Science from Danube University Krems and has published research

on the often-overlooked role of middle managers in sustaining lean transformations. She

describes herself as a "European Lean Citizen" and is passionate about creating organizations

where processes flow, people thrive, and improvement becomes second nature.Nadja holds a Master of Science from Danube University Krems and has published research

on the often-overlooked role of middle managers in sustaining lean transformations. She

describes herself as a "European Lean Citizen" and is passionate about creating organizations

where processes flow, people thrive, and improvement becomes second nature.

Nadjas LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadja-b%C3%B6hlmann/

More Info on the Schaeffler Production System: https://www.schaeffler.com/de/

medien/storys/storys-technologie-system/produktion-in-perfektion/

Stellar Work:

Here is the Stellar Work Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork

Check out www.stellarwork.com for more information about how evolutionary agile

transformations work

Make sure to follow us on your podcast player 🔔